Acer announces new Revo line-up

Doesn’t divulge too many details

THE ORIGINAL ACER Revo was and might possibly still be the best selling ION nettop to date. Now it looks like Acer is getting ready to revamp its Revo product line and it looks like we’ll be seeing quite a lot of new additions that aren’t strictly PC’s as well. Acer has revealed some details about its new products at an event in Beijing, China today, although we’d expect that the nitty-gritty details will be divulged at Computex next week.

Let’s start with the most exciting of the new products, the Revo itself. The original Revo was a somewhat chunky square with a couple of corners missing and that in itself made it an unusual looking system. The new Revo on the other hand is a slim, black monolith with a small gold or possibly copper accent on it. It also appears to come with a stand which allows you to mount it vertically.

We don’t have any details on the hardware specifications, but we’d hazard a guess that Acer will continue to use an Atom processor, although this time we’re looking at the most recent generation of Atom processors, as well as Nvidia’s new “discrete” version of ION. What you can tell from the pictures is that the new Revo has a built in optical drive, something the original Revo lacked. There also appears to be a front mounted IR sensor of some kind, a single USB port behind a flap and a multi-format memory card reader.

All this is pretty neat, but what made us drop our jaws was the new RevoPad. Slotted in below the optical drive is a small removable keypad known as the RevoPad. It’s not a replacement for a keyboard for more advanced things, but this compact keypad allows you to easily type in web addresses and access multimedia features. The RevoPad has a touch sensitive surface and it can be turned into a multi-touch gesture capable touch-pad. It also appears to have a built in rechargeable battery which charges when it’s plugged into the Revo. This has to be one of the coolest features so far this year, although we’re sure we’re in for a few more surprises next week.

Acer also announced the RevoView which is some kind of a media player or PVR with extra features. It has a removable hard drive and the only ports we managed to spot from the pictures Acer sent is a pair of USB ports and a memory card slot. It connects to your TV via HDMI and the press release makes it clear that you can connect surround sound speakers to it, but doesn’t go into any further details. It’s also supplied with a remote control and has a “friendly UI”. We also presume it comes with some kind of network connectivity as it supports various internet services such as Flickr and Picasa, although there’s no mention of any online video streaming services.

Finally Acer has gone and re-branded one of its entry level NAS products as the RevoCenter. Rather than being a NAS, it’s now a storage solution for your digital media content. There doesn’t appear to be much new here in terms of features and the design is exactly the same as the older NAS device. We’re quite looking forward to see what else Acer will unveil at Computex next week, so stay tuned for more details on these new products and more.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and S|A.

SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, security and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture.

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